TIJUANA, Mexico – The discovery of nine human heads last November in a seedy east-end neighbourhood – Granjas Familiares de Matamoros – was a barbaric nadir in Mexico's drug wars.

Three of the decapitated heads belonged to police officers: their credentials were stuffed in their mouths. Police also found an obscure note from the assassins that roughly translates: "We were in it with Fatso (El Gordo),but now we're doing this for Three (Tres)."

Autopsying such grisly remains will never be routine for Dr. Antonio Munoz Lara. Nevertheless, the Baja California state coroner increasingly finds himself working on the human detritus of a drug war that is evolving on two fronts: the fallout from President Felipe Calderon's decision to throw billions of dollars and the Mexican army at the problem; and, in Tijuana, the battle for control of the Arrellano Felix Brothers cartel, which grips this border city like death.

"It gets bloodier all the time," says Munoz, 49, a stocky man who wears a goatee and eyeglasses pushed back on his head. "In my view, it is proof of power ... In other words, `I want to show you I am very, very bad and you'd better not (mess) with me. Nothing's going to stop me.'"

Munoz shouts to be heard over the wail of police sirens. "They're like air raid sirens in wartime," he observes during an interview in his office, not far from the morgue. "We're at war too. This is our war, you see."

Tijuana could be the poster city for life and death in Narcoland. It's a raw, savage city, where cartels revel in cruelty, the more macabre the better. Living here must be like being trapped in a slaughterhouse where anybody – man, woman, child – could be slung up on hooks at any moment.

Munoz says drug crimes today are completely different from those a decade or more ago, when he began forensic work back in his birthplace. Then, there was a degree of control, an unspoken rule that families were exempt from rivalry and revenge, especially women and children.

The town is on the border with the United States, just south of San Diego, a pivotal spot on north-south transit routes and a gateway for the drugs that feed an insatiable appetite in the U.S. and Canada.

Moreover, the recession and rapid plunge in tax-free factory production in this region have left growing ranks of the unemployed vulnerable to the allure of working in the drug trade in order to survive. Many end up using.

Clark fears the Republic of Mexico itself is moving inexorably towards full-blown narco-state status, although – and this is important – it is not there yet. Nobody need look further for proof than Tijuana's makeshift graves and dismembered bodies, or streets where any toddler can pick up a collection of shell casings in minutes.

But even the statistics – 844 drug-war murders in 2008, 169 in the first four months of 2009 – do not do justice to the awful reality of Tijuana life.

IT'S COMMON for corpses of drug war victims to deliver messages, just as last year's decapitated heads were meant to do. Gangsters crave fame, and the Tijuana succession wars involve convicted criminal Armando Villarreal ("Fatso") and aspiring narco-lord Teodoro Garcia Simental ("Tres" – a nickname based on another nickname, El Teo, taken from the first three letters of his name). He's feared for his special medieval ruthlessness. Like beheadings.

On a recent May Monday at the morgue, Munoz completes the autopsy of a male corpse, found in an east-side industrial park (another favourite body dump) with a scrawled message. In a culture where everything "narco" gets a nickname, these are narcomensajes, and this one reads: "This is what happens to prick rats that rob cars at gunpoint."

The autopsy took eight hours because Munoz had to remove 31 bullets from a concentrated area beginning in the lower throat, lungs and diaphragm and extending in fairly straight lines to the liver and kidneys. He grips each bullet with tweezers and lets it drop with a clink into a stainless steel tray. He estimates the man had been dead about six hours before he was delivered to the morgue.

Munoz determined there were two shooters, likely taller than the victim, standing more than a metre away when they opened fire. Police think there were three because they found 66 shell casings from an AK-47, 21 from a 9-millimetre pistol and eight from a weapon of unknown calibre.

They tortured him first, binding his feet with grey masking tape and spraying the ground around him with bullets. Somebody hit him over the head with such force his left eyeball popped out of his skull.

The coroner walks the short distance to his office to fill out paperwork, including the shooting victim's death certificate. Outside, in the waiting room, a middle-aged woman, the victim's aunt, sobs as she asks who will look after his three children.

"Why? WHY?" she cries loudly, a question one might think has an obvious answer.

"Everybody comes here suffering;" says Munoz. "I'm not a police officer and I'm not a judge. I don't judge anyone."

He has worked on headless bodies, bodiless heads, heads without lips or faces, corpses without genitals, legs without feet ... pretty much the whole shebang post mortem.

Sometimes, he even examines vats of greasy liquid with bits of bone in a lye-water solution or sifts through smoking acid ash. His morgue – like others throughout Mexico – is filled with remains impossible to identify.

Munoz believes everybody deserves to carry a name, in life and death. Sometimes, though, that's not possible.

Organized crime is big into kidnapping – for profit and/or silence.

Cristina Palacios Hodoyan, in her 60s, is obsessed with the search for her missing son, Alejandro, 35, whom she counts among the "disappeared."

He was taken on a Wednesday morning in March, 1997. Men armed with AK-47s seized him from his car and then tossed his mother, who had leaped at them screaming and flailing, from their van.

Palacios, who works for the Citizens' Association against Impunity on behalf of the missing, knows Alejandro was mixed up with the Arrellano Felix cartel. It's a complicated tale, with U.S. authorities involved at one point, but it's believed the Arrellano Felix crime family abducted and likely murdered him.

"So," the mother challenges, "is my son not a human being? Did his rights vanish when he was taken? What about all the others?"

She maintains Tijuana authorities do little to help find the hundreds of people missing in the drug wars, including, among others, politicians, police officers, prosecutors, rights activists, musicians and other artists.

Palcacios says she fights tirelessly to find the disappeared. That cause is her raison d'être.

TO DATE IN 2009, 15 cops have died in shootouts and assassinations, reason enough for the police memorial that honours this city's fallen martyrs. Their photographs and names are etched into the gleaming dark stone of a wall that forms part of the tribute.

And yet, oddly, officers on the municipal force stand around chatting outside their station at shift change, eat in restaurants well known to their enemies and ride in rundown vehicles in which sentimental ballads about traffickers – the infamous narcocorridos – soar over the crackle of the police radio. Threats are commonplace.

On Monday, April 27, Munoz and his colleagues worked on the remains of seven police officers – six men and a woman – gunned down in the space of 45 minutes, three in an ambush at a restaurant and the others in separate attacks. The cops are easy targets.

In his government's war against drugs, Calderon dispatched an estimated 25,000-40,000 soldiers to special anti-drug duty across Mexico, including Tijuana. (Not surprisingly, the Mexican armed forces are secretive about information, including troop size and movement, or fatalities, in the drug war.)

Killing soldiers on patrol behind bulletproof glass and armour plating is a lot tougher than taking down local police. Moreover, dead cops bring other benefits. Fewer honest officers mean fewer obstacles to the continual shakedown of local merchants and corporate tycoons for protection money.

Then there's revenge in a city where army Col. Julian Leyzaola – the police chief – and new Tijuana Mayor Jorge Ramos fired 248 officers (out of a 2,160-member municipal force) when the city government changed hands last year. Other officers remain under investigation, with rumours flying about impending purges.

There have been no public breaks in the case of the seven murdered officers, although Baja California Attorney-General Salvador Ortiz Morales insists the war against the cartels is a priority, both for his team and the national government in Mexico City. Organized crime activities – drug trafficking and kidnapping – fall under federal jurisdiction, leading to action by the military, as well as the Federal Police and several special national and state investigative units.

While authorities are beginning to see modest results with some high-profile arrests (see box), Ortiz concludes: "We are not satisfied. All of Tijuana is united against our common enemy."

THIS SCENE IS surreal. No other word can begin to conjure up the bizarre, dreamy quality of the show put on by Mexican military HQ, Region II, for the media today at its base in downtown Tijuana.

Mejia, from the Guadalupe Victoria farming co-operative near the border city of Mexicali, is spindly, scruffy and glazed-looking. He had the great misfortune to have been stopped by an army patrol as he was driving a bright red Kenwood 18-wheeler with 563.8 kilos of marijuana stashed under lightly strewn straw. None too bright, really.

Journalists crowd in. Cameras whir and the ear-shattering calls of peacocks fill the air. The base is home to about two dozen of the big birds, which fan their tail feathers in full mating strut and gawk at the Mejia espectaculo.

"Perhaps you'd like to come over and see his vehicle?" a military press officer asks helpfully, and everybody marches along to do so.

That's it. Show's over. The army got its man and his stash.

Nevertheless, hardly a week goes by without the army heralding some drug bust or another, suggesting great headway is being made in the war on drugs. For the most part, it's small stuff. Mejia's just a mule – low-level and totally expendable.

OUR INTERVIEW over, the light fades fast and Munoz wants to get home. He should rest when he can; he understands better than most the strain and peril of living and working in Tijuana.

"I have respect (for what can happen)," he says. "I can't say I don't live with fear, but I'm not involved. So I have learned if I carry myself with respect, they are going to treat me with respect."

Or so he hopes. That's how everybody gets by in Tijuana, with hope of personally escaping the violence that is both random and, for too many unlucky innocents, horribly targeted.

"What's it like in Toronto? Any jobs for coroners in your city?" he asks, half in jest, as I pack my gear. "How many murders do you have a year?

I reply we've had close to 100 some years. I'm thinking of 80 murders in 2005 – "Year of the Gun" – and 84 in 2007.

He's silent, and then chuckles. There's no humour in the sound. He sighs loudly.